Lou & Billy Joe

There is a place-the Night Owl- in the fictional town of Rolling Hills in California's San Joáquin Valley where local men of a type flock to see the headliner, a voluptuous, auburn-haired pole dancer called-yes- 'Poler Bare.'
Most Night Owl customers couldn't imagine that this star worked a second job.
'Poler Bare' also led a third life, one requiring cunning, courage, and compassion-a life fraught with danger, including the possibility of death.
The secret of these separate lives began to unravel when a brash young smart-ass asked a boorish question.
The story of this remarkable, multi-dimensional woman and her alliance with the young smart-ass brings readers face to face with one of the most intractable social, economic, and political problems facing the United States in the 21st Century.

Why do people choose a particular book? I suppose there's at least one scholarly paper or book that tries to answer this question. I confess I haven't a clue, but occasionally I do get curious.
This happens to be one of those times. So, let me guess about your choice of this book. Possibly, the title reminded you of singer-songwriter Bobby Gentry's 'Ode to Billy Joe.' Perhaps it was the arresting woman on the cover (spoiler alert: she's not Lou).
You may have wondered, Lou who? Billy Joe who? Or, does the pairing of Lou and Billy Joe correspond to 'Bonnie & Clyde, ' 'Butch and Sundance' or 'Thelma & Louise'? (Those all ended how?)
In any case, I think you will not easily forget Lou Fisher or Billy Joe Wilson, just as you have already guessed the answer to the buddy question in the previous paragraph. (Spoiler alert.)
*
Those who knew Lou described her as mysterious, ambiguous, and contradictory. Probing further, was she a bad, good woman? A good, bad woman? Was she a casual observer of events, an immaterial witness, the kind lawmen deceptively call a 'person of interest'? Was Lou Fisher on the side of the angels or of Lucifer? Regardless of the answers to these questions, she was a person of interest, neither immaterial nor a casual observer of anything.
Lou did not see life in black and white. She believed in and lived in a world of gray where the words and deeds of people offered not surety but complexity. She subscribed to the paradigm that history-life-unfolds from the choices a person makes. Yogi Berra's whimsical suggestion that, 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it!' might have baffled her-just before she broke out in laughter.
Lou knew the expression that life is an 'open book' that unfolds page after page. But there was another possibility, one that may have better explained Lou: life is lived in the vertical, unfolding not in linear, horizontal chapters where one thing leads to the next, but in layers ... layers of unpredictability, often in contradiction, that must be shuffled or peeled away one by one to see what is hidden one layer below or deeply beneath.
The passage of time provides the opportunity to re-examine a life. But lives intertwine and thus, answers to questions about Lou's life and legacy must begin with the coincidental story of a brash, young, smart-ass named Billy Joe Wilson. His was also a life layered in unique elements of mystery, ambiguity, and contradiction.
Perhaps you will agree when you have finished the story of Lou and Billy Joe. Perhaps you won't. In any case I trust you will have enjoyed the ride.